Generic Company Place Holder Habits Pro (Tasks, Goals, Habit Tracker)

We’re a month-and-a-half into 2012, and the more ambitious among us are still trying to stick to those New Year’s resolutions we made to become better, smarter, healthier people. There are a number of iOS apps to help you stay on track with those resolutions (or to get started with new ones, if you don’t limit your self-improvement efforts to the beginning of the calendar year). Unfortunately, Habits Pro, a $3 offering for iPhone and iPad from Track & Share Apps, is not one of the better offerings.

To be fair, Habits Pro offers many options for making goals and sticking to them. You can add goals to the app, tasks to achieve those goals—even slotting in which days of the week are best for performing those tasks—and check in daily with your progressing to achieving it all: If you have a goal of sleeping seven hours a night—early to bed, early to rise, and all that—the app will applaud you for meeting 114 percent of that goal if you sleep eight hours. You can track your daily, weekly, or monthly progress via a series of charts, and you can share that information with your friends and family using Twitter or email.

Hard Habit to Break: Habits Pro lets you track your daily, weekly, or monthly progress via a series of charts, though the process of adding and managing tasks can be a little hard to get a handle on.

The problem with Habits Pro is that it seems overly elaborate, without any sort of in-app tutorial to guide you through the process of adding new tasks or eliminating the goals that come pre-programmed into the app. I stumbled through the process before making a trip to the developer’s website, which offered plenty of guidance. There’s a big contrast between this and a goal-oriented app like Next, which is simple, elegant, and intuitive to use.

One other complaint: This app can be used on both the iPhone and iPad, but there appears to be no way to sync the service between devices. Productivity apps are less useful if their information is confined to a single device.

Goal-making apps should make it easier to achieve your aims, instead of bogging you down in detail. Habits Pro doesn’t quite pass the test.

[Joel Mathis is a freelance journalist and political columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. He lives in Philadelphia.]

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